Word: refract
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...After a dreamy sequence imagining Reagan practicing his swimming, Morris observes: "The swimmer enjoys a loneliness greater, yet oddly more comforting, than that of the long distance runner. One tunnels along in a shroud of silvery bubbles... Others may swim alongside for a while, but their individuality tends to refract away, through the bubbles and the blur. Often I have marveled at Reagan's cool, unhurried progress through crises of politics and personnel, and thought to myself, He sees the world as a swimmer sees it." It is an elegant way to describe the serene detachment that marked the public...
What gives the scandals political resonance here is the way they refract the shock that our own effort to stage-manage Russia's successful transformation might have failed. The expectation of quick and miraculous success was naive when applied to a country with a scant history of capitalism, no experience with democracy, and no tradition of the rule of law. Whatever Washington did was a crapshoot. Russians have always cheated the system to survive or thrive, first the Czars, then the Party, now the elected government. Men who were once at home in the old regime hold power...